Clouds flipbook

We have been studying seasonal changes and weather patterns in science.  This week we focused on clouds.  We read books and watched videos about different kinds of clouds and the weather they bring.  After making a graphic organizer together as a class on the board, the kids made these cute flip books.  They labeled the outside flap with the name of the cloud, described it underneath, and made a picture using cotton balls.  I love the cute things they wrote!

Pilgrims Compare Contrast

We have been learning to compare and contrast in our reading lessons this week.  I saw some great things on other first grade blogs and decided to do a Venn Diagram comparing Pilgrim life to life today.

After watching several videos on united streaming and brain pop jr. and reading a few books, we discussed what we have in common with the Pilgrims and how we are different.  I wrote several of those ideas down, printed them and cut them out.  I passed them out to the students and they pasted them in our big Venn diagram.  It was a great formative assessment!

Next we labeled the diagram and started a writing activity.  More on that soon!

Retelling with Pictures

I learned this strategy recently in the Neuhaus training.  This week we focused on sequence in the stories we read, so it was a great time to try out this activity.  As we read a story, a quickly drew some very bad pictures of what was happening.  Afterwards we put them up on the board and used them as a trigger to retell the story.  We added in sequence transition words such as first, next, then, last etc.  The students really enjoyed getting up in front of the class to speak.  This activity was successful because it got the students to summarize, use transition words and speak in complete sentences to tell a story.  We will definitely do this again and try to tie it to a writing activity soon.  

Levels of Government

This is an anchor chart we made a few weeks ago in social studies to learn about the different levels of government.  My students always have such a hard time distinguishing local, state, and national levels so this gives them a great visual reference to start to remember the concept.